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Screenshots of the Ubuntu Edge

We are now roughly three days into the Great Ubuntu Edge Crowdfunding Campaign, and it has been most exciting, for a number of reasons.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Canonical is asking the Ubuntu community and its friends to raise $32 million on Indiegogo to produce a small run of the Ubuntu Edge “super-smartphone.” This device, if the campaign succeeds, should come out in May 2014. The phone is envisioned as a “Formula One” style testbed for advanced mobile technologies. What excites most people is that the phone will have a nearly scratch proof screen, dual-boot the Google Android and Ubuntu operating systems, have 4GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. The latter specs allow you to plug the Edge into a monitor with a HDMI cable and run the full-blown Ubuntu OS. See Introducing the Hardware for details.

Ubuntu Edge: Introducing the Hardware

Why Support Ubuntu Edge?

Now it is fair to ask: Canonical is a for-profit company, with billionaire Mark Shuttleworth at the helm. Why should we fund its gadget research? David Jordan at Novacut has a pretty good answer here. But I want to discuss one specific reason.  If you’ve been around Linux for long, you’ve probably heard some variation of this comment (from a Verge reader):

So they’re expecting people who pay $0 for Ubuntu to shell out $600+ for a phone? Seems unlikely to me.

You see, no matter how often we differentiate “free as in freedom” software from “free as in beer,” we’re still going to hear that Linux users are just freeloaders and pirates who don’t want to pay for anything. To my mind, raising this kind of cash may finally put a dent in that particular argument.

Update: In yesterday’s Ask Me Anything at Reddit, I asked Mark Shuttleworth:

Mark, Some people are suggesting that the Edge Indiegogo campaign was launched because the Carrier Advisory Group wouldn’t fund the project. Please comment on the reasons for choosing the crowdfunding model.

His response:

We certainly didn’t ask the CAG to fund it.

The POINT of crowdsourcing is to shift processes away from industry into the hands of enthusiasts and independent decision makers. We are able to propose a device which would never make it through the risk-averse selection process at a carrier or manufacturer – not because they are dumb, but because the consequences of failure are bad for them personally and institutionally. Crowdsourcing is a new way to approach hard choices, innovation, and risk capital, and I thought it would be a good way to accelerate tech.

We’re doing it because we are setup to host a community, which is what the Edge backers become, that can help finalise the Edge spec and then work on next-gen specs too. We’re already doing that every day, while the major carriers / manufacturers are not setup to do that.

So, if you have a few bucks (or a few hundred) to give to a free software project, I think you should give to the Ubuntu Edge–whether you want this phone or not. Feel free to click the widget over there on the right. If you’ve got some extra, Larry the Free Software Guy has a great list of alternatives in his post. I’ll address some of his arguments in a future post.

I definitely want to hear what you think about Ubuntu Edge and the Indiegogo campaign. In the meantime, here are some of the more interesting pieces of news and commentary in these early days. I’m also collecting stories at Scoop.it.

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Ubuntu Linux Mobile
Ubuntu Linux Mobile (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Perhaps you’ve noticed, there’s been a bit of activity in the Ubuntu part of the universe, especially when it comes to mobile devices. I am pleased to announce that I’ve just started writing a book for QUE that we are currently calling Ubuntu Touch: Using the Ubuntu OS on your Smartphone or Tablet.

 

This book will not be a guide to the proposed advanced Ubuntu Edge phone, but will instead be a guide for using Ubuntu on any supported mobile device. I will have more to say about the book as time goes on.

 

Between the new book project and all the news surrounding Ubuntu these days, I’ll be bringing the first of a few changes here at MichaelMcCallister.com. This week marks the birth of “Notes from the Ubuntuverse,” a blog with news and commentary on various Ubuntu-related topics. The blog will probably be mostly about mobile Ubuntu, but I’m sure other things (like Kubuntu) will come up from time to time. I have a lot to say about the Edge project too–watch this space!

 

Finally, I’ve been redesigning the site to bring it into the Twenty Teens, and it’s coming real soon.

 

Longtime followers of my career (yes, all 15 of you) are probably wondering about a couple of things: I still spend most of my computing time running openSUSE Linux, and I don’t expect that to change substantially while I write this book. While I expect to get quite familiar with the (in)famous Unity desktop in the coming months, I’m still a KDE guy at heart. And you can count on this site running WordPress nigh on to forever.

 

I am excited to start a new Linux book, and hope you’ll join me on this journey through the Ubuntuverse. Is there something about Ubuntu that perplexes you? I want to help. I am also interested in your thoughts, and ideas for the next iteration of the site. That’s what the Comments area is for, you know.

 

 

 

 

 

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WordCamp Milwaukee 2013 Logo

WordCamp Milwaukee 2013 LogoHad a great day at WordCamp Milwaukee 2013 Saturday! We had 280 people pre-registered, with very few unclaimed badges at the end of the day, plus a few folks who registered at Bucketworks. The place was packed from the opening remarks through the after-party at Milwaukee Brewing Company.

I attended Aaron Holbrook’s session, “WordPress is a CMS, Dammit!” This was the first time I’d heard about the Advanced Custom Fields plugin that simplifies and extends custom post types, but it would come up several times in the course of the day. Looking forward to trying that out here soon.

Next up was Gloria Antonelli‘s “Theme Selection Field Guide.” This may have been my favorite session (and I hope she posts her slides). She offered a great set of guidelines and gotchas when looking for a theme for your site. Main takeaway: Too many ThemeForest developers don’t understand how WordPress works, and thus break things when you install their theme.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson offered a funny excursion through some hard-won experience in managing projects (and expectations) in “Scoping Projects to Avoid Stress, Headaches and Angry Mobs.” Next time you see her, be sure to ask about the FBI.

The lunch line snaked all the way through Bucketworks and out onto the sidewalk by the time I got in it, but there was plenty of sandwiches and salads from Milwaukee’s Waterfront Deli left even for the stragglers. Conversations carried on throughout the building over lunch, and I got some last-minute prep time for my presentation.

The session I led this year was amazing! The assembly of around 50-60 animated and inspired people. Unlike last year, my computer cooperated, and I didn’t try to pack too much information into the allotted half-hour. This resulted in an excellent discussion of “Building Authority and Audience with WordPress and Google Authorship.” Thanks to all who attended, asked questions, hit me up later and just thought good thoughts.

After my talk, I volunteered for an hour at the Happiness Bar, but no one came with any problems. So I chatted with the other folks and checked in at home.

Next up was Heather Acton’s terrific session, “Stop Giving S*** Away for Free and Start Feeding Your Family.” She complemented Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s talk quite nicely with her rules for freelance web designers, new and old. When your friends and family hear you can make web pages, you can often be hit up for favors. It’s just too easy to be “nice” and wind up being exploited. Writers run into the same problem. Heather has managed to balance pro bono work for nonprofits and still use her abundant talent to make a decent living.

The soon-to-be-world-famous WordCamp MKE Bacon Bar
The soon-to-be-world-famous WordCamp MKE Bacon Bar

But just before that session started, our afternoon snack arrived, and a legend was born: the WordCamp Milwaukee Bacon Bar! So maybe there wasn’t a lot of variety to the bacon, but it was fresh, and there was lots of it! People lined up with plates big and small to take back to their session. You can find many pictures of the spread (besides this one I took) using the hashtag #baconbar.

My head was starting to get full by the end of the day, and I wound up sampling a few of the last sessions. Michelle Schulp urged her colleagues in the web design field to collaborate more with the nerdier web developers they seem to clash with. Josh Betz whipped all the way through his “WordPress Development Workflow” in around 15 minutes, but still managed to show off some other projects after the formal presentation (Confession: at that point I was caught up in the Twitter feed, which kinda continued into the next session.)

As a technical communicator, I was naturally attracted to Jamie Schmid’s talk on improving the user experience for the WordPress Admin page. While still a little distracted (Scott Offord’s always popular SEO talk was generating much Twitter-love at the same time), Jamie’s discussion of how Advanced Custom Fields makes it possible to use structured text in WordPress piqued my curiosity. Kristof van Tomme has been working for some time to make Drupal a decent platform for software documentation by supporting the Darwin Information Type Architecture (DITA). I have waited for WordPress types to do similar work; perhaps this is an incentive to look a little harder.

After a long, hard day, many of us retired to the AfterParty at the Milwaukee Brewing Company. This party featured generous beer samples, mini-tours of the brewery, a variety of pizzas and bruschetta snacks from Transfer Pizza down the block, and Purple Door Ice Cream. A great way to end the day.

I had other responsibilities on Sunday, but I hear that went really well too. You can find links to nearly all the slide presentations with this Google doc. Watch WordCamp TV for recordings of the talks.

I am so looking forward to 2014, but worried how we’re going to top this year.

Were you able to come to WordCamp Milwaukee 2013? Have any ideas for next year? Want to hear more about Google Authorship? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below (and over at the WordCamp Milwaukee site too).

 

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